


Deuce

by otherwiseGent



Category: Persona 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-02-28 11:30:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2730857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/otherwiseGent/pseuds/otherwiseGent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In any card game, even with a Tarot deck and a predestined hand, one hand can make all the difference if you're willing to bet it all on a long shot -- and betting on the Wild Card, especially in the hands of a bitter young woman whose dreams are always about escaping, is nothing if not a long shot.<br/> <br/>(Saki Konishi gets the Wild Card.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Round 2

The pantheon, standing in the fog of the human mind, could fight with lightning hotter than hate or untouchable fire, air that could microwave itself, storms that would reduce flesh to its component particles down to quarks, gluons, undiscovered elements, throwing ice-nine into the fluids of each others’ bodies only to be forced to heal wounds that would cripple civilizations —

Instead, they play cards.

The gods play every game on every side with every possible hand, but the dealer is always the same — a man with too many angles, wretched in the curve of his joints and the eyes like bloody lightbulbs and the painted smile, and he deals on behalf of the half-masked king of the game who ensures there’s cards at all, instead of perpetual war, and he always knows who has what, and who deserves what they get, and who’s leaving the table and going wherever gods go.

The gods play cards, but they play with a nontraditional deck of twenty-one suits (give or take a few variations - not everyone accepts that the Aeon should be welcome in the deck) and one wild card.

The gods play with every hand and every suit except for one. The wild card doesn’t get dealt to gods, though some have held it and exulted in their good fortune to have a ticket to success - and gods always play to impress (one could have won with a two-card flush, the Moon and Hunger, but insisted on playing a Fool). Such gods soon fold, and aren’t seen at the table again, for the sin of trying to upset the table and for trusting too much in divinity, which, for all its glory, is fragile and destructible. Only mortals receive the wild card, and only from the Dealer, though the gods have agreed amongst themselves to pretend it’s theirs to graciously gift to poor little people-who-die. Despite this, mortals with the wild card always seem to win, sooner or later; they don’t know the rules, or care, and can cheat without reprimand.

These are the rules. They play forever in the fog, with twenty-one suits and one wild card that no one gets but those who deserve to use it, and a god who has nothing left to bet never plays again, not once in the endless rounds over endless instances of the same game spread over endless instantiations of reality —

The gods play cards, and hate rules.

Sometimes, while the Dealer is looking the other way — when the man who loves games but likes them to end in blood can slip an ace in someone’s sleeve, the man who loves gods for being humans with the brakes removed — the rules can be circumvented. 

The queen of filth is back at the table. They deal her in, the cards are played (and there’s the beggar and his dog stepping off the cliff and trusting in the wind again) and now it’s time for the mortals to make bets...


	2. Two of Burdens

4/11. A Monday. It’s raining, soft and thin, when Saki Konishi leaves Konishi Liquor for school, earlier than necessary.

She hasn’t had breakfast, at least not with her family; breakfast is going to be Junes’s brand new “Break in a New Day” griddle-combo and some of the cream puffs that were about to go bad. Naoki knows he never finishes them, but he still shouts at her whenever she takes them. She barely notices, especially since she’s half-out the door by the time he says anything. For now, she bears up under her umbrella, opening it a little wider as she hits and untangles the catch in the mechanism.

Walking, she thinks a little about dream interpretation, and what last night's may have meant -

The subway tunnel stretching into infinity, walls dark, and the blue train with the goblin-like conductor and his assistant. He’d asked her to sign a contract affirming - that “you have no one to blame but yourself." Dressed up fancifully, maybe, but that was all it had said. He’d dealt her cards, too, in some fortune-telling shtick. A falling building struck by lightning, and a lunar eclipse. Disaster and mystery.

"Does that mean anything?" She swings on her heel as she turns a corner, considering for a second. Inaba, tired as it is, seems more or less the same as it ever was; the rain is still light, the roads straight and clean and practically untouched by tire marks, and Junes, already a fixture, just sits there, squatting like a big cheerful tick on the landscape, perfectly content with itself. It’s the shopping district’s own personal Tower, throwing lightning from its peak.

Saki works there, and people keep asking her why. Indirectly, of course.

Even this early, they’ve still got some enthusiastic shoppers looking for morning bargains, and people like her who have somewhere else to be but are still here. Saki goes inside, finds the food court and the only non high-schooler employee at the grill, intent on the grill. “Morning, Na-san.”

“Ah, Konishi.” Na-san is already moving thin, bargain-brand slices of meat onto the grill; the bun sits nearby. (She doesn’t know what “Na” is short for.) “Hanamura - little Hanamura - asked me to ask you whether you can call in a friend for this afternoon. Late shift is going to be hell, apparently. Manager’s authorized to dispense an extra paycheck."

“Hmm,” Saki hmms. “I’ll ask around.” She won’t.

“He said he’ll cover the slack if you can’t bring anyone.” The meat sizzles, and Na flips it. “Looked real earnest when he said it, too.” Of course he did.

“Tell Hana-chan I’ll do what I can.” Na-san smiles a little while he hands back her change. The coins are a little greasy in her hand, and she transfers them to her wallet with faint displeasure.

The food court has umbrella seats, and there - right there - is an invitingly open table, and only one other person around, some guy in some other school’s uniform looking down at his hands. She takes a seat and watches the clouds. Sometimes she has dreams about drowning in this rain, but it’s never gotten strong enough in her lifetime to flood anywhere but the flood plain.

Saki doesn’t exactly like working at Junes. But the pay is —

“Hey!”

She startles. There’s a black uniform in front of her, and when she looks up there’s a face in it - a younger boy, with the biggest eyes she’s ever seen, a mark on his cheek, and before she can say anything he says “H-hey! Are you paying attention?!"

“What?"

“You're going to Yasogami, right? Which way is it from here?”

“I-I — you’re not a student at —” Something about this boy is nauseating to her. His stance, maybe, hunched over himself in confrontation, or the thin sheen she can see on his cheeks, rainwater and a greasy patina in which she can barely catch her own reflection, unpleasantly reminiscent of the grease in her breakfast.

“Who c-cares? Just tell me where it is!”

Saki looks down and points in a more-or-less random direction. Her fingernails, on her other hand, are filthy, she realizes. Dark with grime and grit and rain-slickness. She almost forgets that she’s pointing until something inside her springs loose and remembers someone’s standing there, or was. When she looks up, the unsettling student is gone.

She leaves without finishing her burger. She’s not hungry any more.

— — — — — 

School is quiet, mostly. Saki sort of tunes out the lesson, taking automatic, sparse notes. (Mrs. Kazawa, their homeroom teacher, isn’t attentive enough to notice.) Mostly, she listens to the chatter, the words that sit at the periphery and edge their way in when they can and burst all at once when lunch rolls around and once more at the end of the day.

“So I heard that the kid just stands outside looking totally lovelorn, and —"

“An affair! Seriously! And she’s nothing compared to —"

“Experts think the fog is actually the leading cause of —"

It rolls over her like the surf. Later, she’ll watch the news and figure out what parts are objectively real, which parts are total fiction and which are facts the media’s decided to jazz up. “The early train to Inaba crashed this morning.” “There’s a killer on the loose.” (That’s an old rag that never changes; there have always been stories about a murderer in Inaba, like people want divine punishment or something.) She chats, a little, badmouths things other people are badmouthing, and the day flows by like a river of rust and silt.

Class ends, and the kids disperse; Saki, with her stomach mostly settled, leaves for Junes.

— — — — —

“Find anyone, Senpai?”

Yosuke Hanamura is the son of Junes's manager, and he has the world’s most transparent crush on Saki Konishi, the daughter of the family he and his department store are putting out of business. It’d be romantic if she were even slightly interested, but the kid is kind of a dipstick and doesn’t really have friends except for her and maybe Chie Satonaka, the second-year who kicks people in the nuts a lot. (Except Saki doesn’t really have friends either. Just Yosuke Hanamura and her once-boyfriend in the city and her little brother. Why doesn’t she know any girls?)

He himself, meeting her in the food court, is sort of like a puppy: cute in a "boy band" way, sort of, short-haired, disappointing.

“Hey, Hana-chan.” On comes her smile, tinged with contrition. Saki’s changed and ready for the day. “Sorry, but no one went for it.”

Yosuke runs a hand through his hair. “I guess this is going to be a two-employee operation." (He says it in his just-joking tone of voice and she knows he's happier than he lets on.)

It usually is. Saki and Yosuke keep ending up together on their shifts.

There's an indignant sound. Someone is not being serviced. "Can you go handle —"

The next few hours are a blur.

Saki’s job is answering questions / not answering loaded questions (but _pleasantly_!) / being gawked at / hearing unflattering jokes / wincing a little as hot grease stings at her hands and wrists where the gloves don't fit right. She bags litttle plastic miscellanea, fills paper sacks, chats about the merits of home entertainment systems. She smiles every time she looks at Yosuke and he notices, and she notices that he notices. For example: he trips over his own feet and she grabs him and sets him upright. She smiles at him. He smiles at her. He looks away, embarrassed, and she starts on her other jobs, which are everything.

Saki's job is cleaning, too, when a kid gets a nosebleed. It's sudden and unfortunate and all over a high schooler's shoes, so she swabs at it with a mop and bucket and cleans the shoes for free (there doesn't seem to be enough water in the world for the dirty red-on-white). While she's handling it, she sees the kid's run off and unstuffed her nose with more, this time on someone's shirt. “Cleanup in aisle 4,” she says, and Yosuke smiles at the in-joke. He’s sweating, as overworked as she is, but smiling. “Roger that.” He turns on his heels and, grabbing the mop and bucket from her, runs towards the produce aisle.

For a brief period, Saki is asked for nothing. She begins to watch the customers, waiting for someone to ask for help. A couple of dumb kids. Someone who looks unwashed. A woman she doesn't recognize carrying a huge bag and looking at her with barely concealed -- is that contempt? The thought is a little unnerving.

"Is everything to your satisfaction, ma'am?" Her only response is a huff, as the woman power-walks away. Someone she's never met, never heard of, hates her. Somehow, this is worse than everything else.

When Yosuke swings back around, she says "I'm not feeling too hot. Sorry, but could you take over for five minutes?" "Of course," he says. Earnest as a dog. Wordless, Saki smiles and turns to the break room and sits back against the wall, her hair wild. The old clearance TV Yosuke has provided for her out of the kindness of his heart only turns on when she presses the button directly, and she does so; it only gets the news, really, so that's what's on. The local reports corroborate a few of the rumors from earlier: there really was a train crash on the line on the way to Yasoinaba, which has apparently resulted in "a miraculously low number of casualties" for its severity. Then it's the Mayumi Yamano story again: "Eye Television has canceled..." Anyone can recite it by now. Everyone in Inaba knows everything about everything that happens here.

Why does she work at Junes? Why, when all it does is leave her behind a counter fielding little shots at her by self-righteous business owners, makes her privy to everything the high schoolers say (and they do say), leaves her parched and more than a little angry and exhausted only to come home to more of that, when the building itself reminds her of a squatting toad? The pay that she puts back into the mouth of Junes soon after leaving? What?

Why all this?

She shakes her head and stands to get back to work, then stumbles a little from low blood pressure, nearly leans against her TV before she remembers herself and shifts her shoulders against an unoccupied stretch of wall. Can’t damage the merchandise.

She’s got more saved up every day. Breakfast doesn’t cost everything she makes. Her bank account is steadily getting fuller.

This cheery boulder is bearing down on her, sure, but soon she’ll be able to push it off her back and find somewhere else, somewhere where she doesn’t have to think about the Liquor Store or this town or the Prince’s stupid mood. That’s her solution. That’s her Tower. Let this place be leveled in her mind.

She buckles down for the rest of the shift, and her headache is long gone but she still feels every speck of grime under her fingernails, which need to be cut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can I write for Saki? No, I cannot.


	3. Three of Homes

Eventually, Saki's shift ends, though it takes about a thousand years in subjective time. Yosuke congratulates her for a job well done, then wink-smiles like he does, looking as if he expects her to ask him to take it back, and she (reluctantly, but still immediately) imitates the gesture: head-to-one-side, quick-not-quite-flirting-wink, resist the urge to make a finger gun which may tip the scale from homage to sarcasm. 

“Happy to help, Hana-chan."

The worst part is how sincere his delight is. When she walks off, Hana-chan still looks like someone shoved a Christmas tree up his nose and lit his skull up with fairy lights inside. 

The rain’s let up, so she takes a long, meandering walk home, saying hello to a few locals she vaguely recognizes - a kind of dopey-looking guy with a tie and some twins. She’s at the corner of the shopping district street when she hears a faint rattle-whir that gets suddenly louder, and dodges to one side as some guy on a rickety old bike shoots by. He shouts something as he passes, but she can’t quite make it out; it sounds either like a profanity or an apology.

(She wishes the kid hadn’t apologized (or, uh, cursed.) It’s the most interesting thing that’s happened to her all day.)

Brushing it off pretty quickly, she gets home. Naoki is out at club, or Health Association or whatever, so she’s got the run of the house; she chooses to take a sprawling seat on her bed, her hair fanning out on the pillow like a flare. Of course, she only remembers then that she doesn’t remember where the remote is for her TV, so she has to get up to turn on the local news on her dinky little old-timer set. Eye Television, Inaba Channel 5.

As usual, the news uses respectable language with very little substance to it. It's the thousandth rerun of Mayumi Yamano’s tawdry love affair with Taro Namatame, and Misuzu Hiiragi’s reaction, and the train thing again -- the update is that the injured (miraculously few!) are being moved to Inaba Municipal Hospital. What a way to start life in Inaba: trapped from the word go.

(Maybe it’s divine punishment?)

“Sis?” Saki jumps a little.

Naoki is back. “Health Association let out early?”

“I showed up a little late, and they told me they had everything in hand.” He shrugs. “It seemed sort of rude to me, but they insisted..."

“Well, if they were okay with it, there’s no problem, right?”

“I guess so.” Naoki sits. “Anything interesting on the news?"

“A minor train incident, apparently. And they’re rerunning the Namatame story again."

“Kind of depressing, isn’t it?” And just like that, Naoki produces the remote and changes channels.

“Geez, _seriously_?” She’s impressed, and a little irritated. “Did you seriously find my remote just so you could do that? That’s a pretty serious investment of time and effort just to screw with your sister.”Naoki doesn’t even have the decency to look contrite. (Or maybe he just found it on her dresser and she's terrible at searching; that’s a distinct possibility.)

At least the channel is inoffensive: the screen has a graphic of rain and an aimlessly pleasant voice narrating something about stratocumulus clouds and the probability of rain. It’s the weather channel, which by all accounts should be boring, but Saki has long recognized the pleasure of monotony and, besides, sometimes they pipe in rain BGM, which is exactly what she needs to calm down after a long day even if there is real rain. Something about real rain seems fake, sometimes.

“So how was my cream puff?"

“…c’mon, Naoki. You can be charitable about one little dessert, right? I’ve offered to pay you back, too."

“I don’t want to be _paid_ , sis, I want to _eat cream puffs_. There’s a subtle distinction there, I know, but I really thought you’d pick up on it."

Sibling bickering, like rain on TV, is white noise for Saki. She talks about nothing with Naoki for a while, breaks off to do homework (Mrs. Kazawa assigns difficult work, for such an unassuming teacher), sends a few emails and surfs the internet for a while before dinner.

Dinner is a nice chicken dish, spiced by her brother. The Konishis eat as a family; that is the rule —

(— and if these words are exchanged:

“Thank you, Naoki; it’s nice to have someone around to help with these little things when I need it."

and the implication is:

“Not like your sister."

They are lost in the ceaseless thrumming of rain.)

— — — — —

As is usual, her first waking thought is to wring the sleep out of her hair with her hands. The strange thing is, that same hair feels slightly damp, in a way she’d call dewy if she were more poetic than confused. Vaguely aware of her arms, she reaches to her scalp and (perhaps misguidedly) tries to rub the wet away. It’s ten full seconds of pulling at her off-brown tresses (making no process in drying out) before she decides to open her eyes and face whatever’s soaked her this early in the morning on a school night.

She’s sprawled out on a surface that feels vaguely like tile, and it dawns in a few seconds that this cannot possibly be her floor, which is teak-hard wood, the signature of her old, old house, covered with the clothing she can’t be bothered to pick up. Her floor is not this cold, and her floor doesn’t  _pulse_ — this floor is thumping like a heart inside someone in deep trouble. It’s dark red, she sees, and smooth as glass.

Wherever-this-is proves, as she lifts her head from the tile (a weird perfectly-ordered design of cubes she sees as she lifts her face), to be shrouded in a thick, pale-blue fog. She takes a few tentative steps and almost falls — the platform she’s on terminates in a sheer drop to either side of her, but, once she walks a few more steps in another direction, prodding with a foot after every step, to extend much further towards some unknown terminus, (she presumes). More of a road than a platform, then.

She walks for a while, looking for familiar shapes in the fog the way she does back home, but it’s almost reflective — at the right angle, she might be able to see herself, and she can tell that this would be a true mirror, one that will reflect what is and not what other people see. She can almost make out a lock of her own hair, the color of weak coffee, wet with — dew? Only something in her expects it to be matted filthy and dark —

“Have you come for the truth?"

She turns forward, and there’s a door - or a gate, or a sculpture, but it's something made of concentric rings that cuts off the platform and rises infinitely upward. 

“If that is truly your desire… then prove it to me."

There’s a weight in her hand, she realizes, with a smooth grip like a bike handle. She looks down at a tapering, curved object, with its weight in the end she isn’t holding. There's text on it, faded to illegibility. It makes her feel thirsty.

She touches the rings and they turn in a way that appalls her eye and sense of space. Beyond is a figure with no features besides fog, only a smooth unknowable profile. “If you wish to know me, then act,” it says, and its voice comes from everywhere.

Instinctively, she knows to strike, and it recoils back in a boneless way, moves without seeming to move.

“Your will is greater than you know… but you have no direction.” It moves in the hissing static fog, and suddenly everything thickens and congeals around her. She can smell alcohol and frying meat and ozone —

“Humans act only on those truths that please them, and forget the rest… can you prove otherwise?"

It engulfs her, and the weight in her hands is gone. The air begins to taste rancid. She feels drunk. She feels like Death is on her shoulders, perching and crowing. She feels like _Saki Konishi is dead, everyone knows, it was on the evening news_  —

“In a different land… seek me out, if you care enough to try."

Something has her by the ankle. She looks down into a pit of black gas and red flecks of filth, and the thing whose face is coated with shadow growing out of the dead land, and it is familiar.

Saki wakes up from dying, and falls out of bed.


End file.
